Yes—the time they had been apart had not been long, yet his memories of her had already grown somewhat hazy. Chen Xuan held his breath and carefully examined every detail of her. Her brows, the corners of her eyes, her cheeks, her lips—many of them differed from how he remembered them. His mind worked like a high-speed editor, automatically correcting each discrepancy until she overlapped with the image in his head.
In the end, his brain reached a conclusion: she really was Lin Qing. Unless there happened to be a twin or clone in this world who matched her perfectly.
He said "matched," rather than "resembled," because Lin Qing was clearly no longer the future warrior she had once been.
Her hair had turned pure black, no longer the brilliant pink-purple-blue gradient it used to be. Her face was dusty and grimy, unlike the perpetually flawless synthetic skin she had once possessed. She looked more like an explorer who had endured a long journey.
The rest of her was the same.
For example, her brows were far less groomed, and her lips were extremely dry, even blistered and cracked—things that would have been absolutely impossible to see on Lin Qing's original face.
She had shed her Cybernetic Body and become an ordinary person.
Of course, calling her an ordinary person in the literal sense would not have been quite right. At the very least, modifications were visible around her wrists and neck, much like Zhuang Yu's.
That was not strange. If one relied solely on a natural body, encountering a Nano-Lifeform meant certain death. She had traveled through the wilderness for a long time, so modification was practically necessary.
It was just that the Cybernetic Body technology in this world was far inferior to that of the future before the